FDTE Case Study

Challenge

The biggest concern for FDTE's technical leadership was that the development process depended on a shared DevOps team to assist with anything related to infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

That meant every time developers needed a pipeline modification or a new staging environment for a microservice or had issues deploying to existing pre-production environments, they had to wait for the DevOps team.

The problem per se was not the time a DevOps engineer would take to do the work, but they were often busy with planned duties and could only pick up an unplanned ticket after 2-3 days.

Even though some of the developers were fully qualified to perform most of the DevOps tasks related to pipelines and deployments, they still depended on the DevOps team because they had ownership of infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

Solution

Gustavo knew intuitively that developers should be able to use self-service environments, but it wasn't clear to him that an out-of-the-box solution existed until he read an article from Bunnyshell on Medium.

FDTE's developers needed a way to safely deploy their applications in a cloud environment without having to depend on a DevOps team for such routine operations. On the other hand, the DevOps team needed a way to enable developers to self-service cloud environments so that they don't need to spend hours replicating Kubernetes deployments, CI/CD pipelines, or provisioning cloud services.

Bunnyshell's team ran a POC with FDTE's technology stack, and the team was impressed with how easy it was to replicate or even create an environment from scratch with all their apps, services, and databases, similar to production - without the need of a DevOps person.

Everything runs on FDTE's cloud infrastructure, and developers have access to all the tools to provision, build, deploy, and debug their applications in cloud environments without explicit access to infrastructure or pipelines.

Results

Because 80% of the applications FDTE is developing are deployed on Kubernetes, the DevOps team just needed to provision a cluster for developers and connect it to Bunnyshell from the UI.

From there, instead of logging a DevOps ticket and waiting for 3 days, developers can now spin up a production-like environment with all the services required and deploy code from any branch or commit to it.

That takes, on average, 15 minutes, and while it's happening, they have visibility into the components that are being built and deployed, the pipeline steps as they run, and real-time logs from their containers directly in the UI.

Since everything is running in a Kubernetes-based cloud environment, pretty much what you see is what you get when pushing to production.

Moving forward

FDTE team is moving forward with a focus on leveraging Terraform modules and Helm charts to unlock more cloud infrastructure options for their environments.

The team plans to expand its use case to on-demand production environments in March. Despite not being at the stage of automating PR environments, the team spins up a preview environment every time they review code and perform integration tests. Spinning up an environment with a few clicks has revolutionized the team's ability to troubleshoot and trace issues.

By expanding their use of Bunnyshell, they plan to introduce it to clients as a DevOps optimization platform. Bunnyshell has allowed the team to improve their development process continuously, and they are finding new use cases weekly. The team is confident in the value they are getting from Bunnyshell and are expanding use cases gradually as their development process matures.